It was snowing when about 13,000 people got in line to see Senator Bernie Sanders kick off his 2020 presidential bid in Brooklyn on Saturday. Brooklyn is the borough in which Sanders was born, and it is where he attended the city’s first coeducational liberal arts college for a year in 1959. In those days, it was pretty much free. Public colleges in New York City charge tuition now. The same trajectory goes for rent control, the regulation that enabled Sanders, his mother, father, and brother to live in the Midwood neighborhood, along with inhabitants of the other 2 million rent-controlled apartments that could be found in the city when Sanders was growing up. It was notable that the senator later shared these stories with the assembled crowds; he has been notoriously reticent to talk about himself and where he comes from, focusing instead on our current version of New York, and America—where life is made easier for the ultra-wealthy, for corporations, for what Sanders likes to call “special interests,” and for people like Donald Trump.

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“It used to be when you went to college, a summer job would pay for your tuition,” John Zimmerman, 72, a Vietnam veteran from Port Washington, New York, told me. “We’re going in the wrong direction.” The universal programs and socialist-leaning policies that Sanders has promised to implement—like tuition-free college, Medicare for All, and a federal jobs guarantee—theoretically provide a course correction. The people in line on Saturday talked about wanting to be able to afford an education, to buy homes, and health care, health care, health care. A few hours later, at a podium in the middle of the snow-sodden crowd, Sanders called the movement behind him “the strongest grassroots coalition in the history of American politics.”

Just what that coalition looks like is still a topic of debate among the pundit class and voters on the left. It’s now a familiar refrain, carried over from the last time we all headed to the polls to choose a Democratic nominee, when Sanders took on Hillary Clinton in 2016 and lost. Despite his progressive agenda, there’s doubt around who Sanders, to use campaign slogan speak, is really for. Critics say Sanders has had trouble reaching black voters; he has hesitated to call Trump supporters racist, preferring to say they were motivated by “economic anxiety”; and he has not done enough to condemn misogyny in his ranks, from a legion of “Bernie Bros” (known for harassing female reporters online during the 2016 election) or harassment within his own campaign.

The Brooklyn rally presented the first real-time, IRL answer to this question of who exactly wants Bernie Sanders to be president in 2020, in the New York metropolitan area at least. There were families, groups of friends, siblings, couples. There were certainly those that fit a certain archetype of who you might expect to meet at a Sanders rally: Zimmerman, the Vietnam vet, used the phrase “back in my day” several times when we talked. He was the second Jill Stein voter I met. I spoke to a New York University student named Halsey Hazzard who told me, regarding the trolling from Bernie Bros, “Men be like that.” People smoked from their vapes in the cold morning air. A white guy named Jacob, wearing Lil Peep merch, complained about the white singers of the reggae band who entertained the crowd for the first hour.

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Others didn’t fit the profile: I talked to David, a 38-year-old Hispanic man who works for the city and who grew up in Williamsburg “before it was gentrified.” “I don’t know if his message is too big,” he said about Sanders, whom he voted for in 2016, “but it just pushes us in the right direction.” Alina Valdes, 18, from Queens, said that she was at the rally “to show people of color who do support socialism that it’s not just white people who are for it.” There were brothers Kapil, 27, and Tejash, 24, who said that Bernie is “for the people; he’s working for us.” When asked about why there is much ado about the identity of the Sanders coalition, Kapil told me he didn’t know, since Sanders didn’t seem to care about his own. “I do feel like journalists bring that up though, no offense,” Kapil said.

If supporters identified a personality trait they liked about Bernie Sanders, it was his longevity—which isn’t a personality trait, of course, but it is an ironic thing to compliment, given that some Sanders detractors say that he, at 77, is too old to run for office. A cochair of the New York Progressive Action Network, which formed out of the 2016 election, said that the organization made a list of policies a candidate must endorse, and Bernie merely “ticked all the boxes.” Some version of “I don’t support Bernie because he’s Bernie; I support him because of his ideas,” was expressed by many. And the idea that other Democratic candidates have moved leftward on issues like health care, free college, and corporate money in politics was treated with skepticism: “They’re getting on the bandwagon—Bernie is the bandwagon,” exclaimed Kristen Senior, at the rally with her wife, Jody. Eventually, in his speech, Sanders did get personal, a move reportedly encouraged by his advisors, and talked about growing up with family that had—and hadn’t—survived the Holocaust. “I know where I come from,” he said gruffly.

In the warmth of one of the administrative buildings, with chants of “Ber-nie!” filtering in from outside, former Ohio state senator Nina Turner said that Sanders has learned from the last go-round. “He does listen, and change is inevitable for all of us, so it’s really good to see.” She counted herself as evidence of this, having been appointed as cochair of a new committee that includes Rep. Ro Khanna and San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz. “People really believe in the policy platform that Senator Bernie Sanders is pushing. And that doesn’t have an ethnicity or a gender—it really is about humanity,” said Turner.

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The people at the rally were overwhelmingly young. It wasn’t a surprise, given that more millennials voted for Sanders than for Trump and Clinton combined in 2016. But there were so many even younger voters, who were only recently 18, for whom the future is not a subject of cable news debate, but an urgent mess. They talked about climate change. They stood in anxious, excited groups. One couple had come down from NYU because they got an email from a LISTSERV. Two Brooklyn College sophomores who didn’t want to be photographed for religious reasons said they were just trying to get more involved with politics.

This was a thrilling possibility: that there were more and more kids who were coming to electoral politics fresh, unfettered, even by very recent history. I asked a pair of friends, Larry and Kirk, what they thought about the term “Bernie Bros.” “You said that there are misogynist white guys that support Bernie?” Kirk asked. “Honestly, I’m not even familiar with that.” Larry added, “That sounds like propaganda from the other side, like they’re slipping that into the algorithm.” Valdes, the young socialist from Queens, said she thought it was about fear. “I think people underestimate us. I think older people are a little scared of us figuring out that we can do something about our lives.”